Welcome to the Hog Blog, a blog chronicling minor-league baseball in the Lehigh Valley. Tom Housenick, The Morning Call's IronPigs beat writer, has been at The Morning Call since 2008. In a previous lifetime, he was at Lackawanna County Stadium in Moosic talking with future Phillies Jimmy Rollins, Pat Burrell, Shane Victorino and Ryan Howard, among many others.
He’ll now be spending his summers in search of who the Phillies are hoping to be the next Chase Utley and Cole Hamels plus any outfielder who catch and hit. What he really hopes to find are the next Mariano Rivera, Todd Helton and Jim Thome --- great human beings who happened to be great at this sport.
He spent the last five years covering Colonial League football, college basketball and high school track & field.

The tarp is on the field and the skies are overcast but dy at 9:30 this morning, 90 minutes before the schedueld start of the final home day game of the season at Coca-Cola Park.

However, Bill Butler and his staff are tracking a rain cell that might bring a half-hour or so of heavy precipitation to the region, so odds are the game with Durham won't start on time (11 a.m.).

No word on who is replacing Domonic Brown, and even if they decided on who is coming up from Reading chances are he won't be here for today's game. Rich Thompson did play last night and went 4-for-7 with a double and a triple in Reading's 15-7, 11-inning win at Richmond Wednesday night. Michael Spidale also got into the game as a pinch-hitter.

For those thinking (hoping) the Phillies might elevate red-hot Matt Rizzotti to the IronPigs for the final month, you can pretty much forget it. An organization official told me they feel it's "too early" to bump Rizzotti, who has an Eastern League-leading .364 average with 16 homers and 55 RBIs in only 69 games since his promotion from Clearwater, up to Triple-A.